PHP, thou art a wart on the face of the web

davmac

7 years ago

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I’ve long despised most dynamically typed languages, for reasons which I’ve yet to properly enunciate, but I’ve begun to loathe one above all the others: yes, I’m referring to the abomination that is PHP. I’ve never got around to properly writing about why I abhor it so much but I was recently given a link to an article on another blog, which contains (amongst a much larger and very well argued discussion) this little gem (reproduced with permission):

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

I’ve not really ever had to write much PHP but I’ve sat looking over the shoulder of someone who was in the process of coding some small PHP scripts, and I was horrified. The problems with the ‘==’ operator, and the overloading of the function return types, were particularly unsettling. I’ve written previously about my difficulty in just compiling PHP so that it worked as I wanted – which just adds to the feeling that PHP was simply slapped together from a load of unrelated pieces, and it was only by chance that a turing-complete language emerged. One of these days I’ll get around to explaining just why dynamic languages are bad, but in the meantime get some entertainment (and perhaps education) by reading Eevee’s post.